HAYWARD, Calif. -- Half a dozen men are sitting in a circle in a
Pentecostal church in this suburb of San Francisco. A 31-year-old one-time
missionary, who still aspires to spread the Word, is talking about his 12-year
struggle against his own homosexuality.

"I've beaten myself up for it, again and again," he says, clutching a
thin booklet called "Overcoming Homosexuality: Using the 14 Steps."

He confesses: "It's not working, and I don't know why." The others,
regulars at this Friday-night support group, are sympathetic; they know the
temptations of the flesh and the damnation they figure awaits those who
succumb. "It's a matter of will," says one. "You have to make the choice."
Maybe, suggests another, it is demonic possession.

The erstwhile missionary's eyes grow watery. He has begged God to free
him, has surrounded himself with Christians and spent a month in an in-patient
treatment program. But nothing has worked, and thinking about it just makes it
worse -- especially at these meetings. "I'm having sex, I'm having fun, and I
don't feel bad about it," he confesses. "Not getting AIDS is all I care
about."

Silence prevails. The other members stare at their pamphlets or fidget.
"I just want God to accept me," he says finally.

But heavenly blessing isn't an option here. Despite the growing
visibility of gay men and lesbians in U.S. society, the only road to salvation
for homosexuals at the Foursquare Pentecostal Church is the route urged by an
archipelago of fundamentalist Bible fellowships popping up across the country:
salvation through change -- through the embrace of heterosexuality.

"I don't think there's anybody who can't change if they just relax and
let God do what He wants," says Frank Worthen, 64, a pioneer of the change
movement who rejected homosexuality and married.

At the same time, many mental-health professionals and former members of
"change" groups warn that almost nobody's sexual orientation truly changes and
that the road from homosexuality to attempted heterosexuality is littered with
failure and suffering. They tell of people drowned in self-hate, of families
sundered when homosexuals try marriages that flop. Some homosexuals,
distraught that they can't "cure" themselves, have committed suicide.

"They're destroying people's lives," says John Evans, referring to the
change movement. He is a former colleague of Mr. Worthen's in one of the first
ex-gay ministries but now no longer hides his homosexuality. "If you don't do
their thing, you're not of God, you'll go to hell. They're living in a fantasy
world."

Under the umbrella organization of Exodus International, a
nondenominational confederation of fundamentalist groups, the evangelical ex-
gay movement now has 65 ministries, with chapters as far away as Europe, Asia
and the South Pacific. Many alumni have married and had children -- not as a
subterfuge, they say, but as a true expression of their newfound
heterosexuality.

Although other Christian groups offer what they consider deliverance to
homosexuals, Exodus, which claims to have had more than 100,000 requests for
help since it was founded in 1976, is the largest. Because there have been no
follow-up studies, supporters and opponents alike depend on anecdote to make
their cases.

Central to the dispute is whether homosexuality is volitional --
something that the individual chooses or can change his or her mind about.
Recent studies have claimed to find physical differences in the brains of gay
and straight men, and some researchers believe that hormone levels before
birth might tip a person's sexual orientation. Such biological theories are at
loggerheads with the traditional Freudian view -- to which many in the ex-gay
movement subscribe -- that homosexuality arises in early in childhood and is
thus a form of arrested psychosexual development that might yield to therapy.

"There's no link between apes and men, and there's no link between
homosexuality and biology," declares Mr. Worthen, a firm believer that being
gay is a choice. Some evangelical ex-gays believe that, even if homosexuality
should prove to be determined at birth, the Bible merely condemns its
practice. Thus, the good Christian can attain grace by resisting his impulses.
"You can still choose abstinence," says one ex-gay.

Sexual orientation isn't necessarily a clear either/or proposition. A
federally financed study widely reported last week found that about 2.3% of a
sample of U.S. men between the ages of 20 and 39 said they had engaged in
homosexual acts in the past 10 years and that 1.1% considered themselves to be
exclusively homosexual. This new Alan Guttmacher Institute survey attracted
considerable attention because it found fewer homosexuals in the population
than the oft-cited Kinsey Report of 1948 did.

Whatever the numbers, professionals aren't sanguine about the
possibilities of making the leap from gay to straight for someone who has been
exclusively homosexual, not bisexual or somewhere else along the spectrum of
sexuality. "You simply cannot do it by voluntary choice," say John W. Money,
emeritus professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
"It's amazing how fixed it is." Many people in the ex-gay movement say they
were definitely, albeit unhappily, homosexual.

Richard A. Isay, 55, a classically trained Freudian and Cornell Medical
College professor, went through a decade of therapy trying to change his own
sexuality. He married and had two children before divorcing and concluding
that he is gay. In the 20 years since, he has done a lot of work with gay
patients, often trying to allay the anxiety and depression that he believes is
caused by "reparative" counseling.

"I think it's the greatest abuse of psychiatry in America today," says
Dr. Isay, who is also chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's gay,
lesbian and bisexual issues committee. "The attempt to change is extremely
harmful." To Be Young and Gay Being gay, even in an age of openness, is not
easy. Until 1973, the APA regarded homosexuality as a mental illness,
sometimes treatable with aversive electric shocks. Even today, gay youths are
two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than straight youths,
according to a study by the Department of Health and Human Services. The
activist National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says that many gay youths are
forced to leave home by parents because of their homosexuality.

Ex-gays say such turmoil is the predictable result of an unnatural
lifestyle, not an artifact of prejudice and social stigma. Gay fundamentalist
Christians face the added anguish of religious condemnation.

Mr. Worthen has known that anguish since he was 13 and his father died.
Young Frank Worthen went to work after school as a janitor at a San Jose
Disciples of Christ church. He recalls the pastor telling him he could tell he
was gay, but he says he resisted the temptation to act out his impulses until
he became an adult in the late 1940s and threw himself into San Francisco's
then-furtive gay scene.

"It was a real adventure for a young kid," he remembers. But by the time
he was 40, he says, several of his friends had killed themselves. "There were
bars where they checked your ID and if you were 40 you couldn't get in," he
says. "It got to be pretty lonely."

Mr. Worthen owned several import stores and had a career buying and
selling real estate, but he felt spiritually isolated. Leaving his office one
evening with plans to go to a new bathhouse, Mr. Worthen says, he felt God's
presence welling up inside him. He went instead to a Bible fellowship with an
employee of his. And soon he became a regular churchgoer. One day another
parishioner confessed that he sneaked out on his wife to go to gay bars, and
it occurred to Mr. Worthen that he might play a role in helping people out of
homosexuality. He ran an ad in a Berkeley sex paper, offering such assistance.
Sixty people responded. Mr. Worthen, Mr. Evans and others formed Love in
Action, an ex-gay ministry in San Rafael, Calif.

Mr. Worthen says he has never regretted his own change, has never
faltered in his belief in the power of the Holy Spirit to "heal" homosexuals.
He has been married now for eight years. "My marriage is absolutely
wonderful," he says.

But after two years at Love in Action, Mr. Evans, now 58, realized he
could never become heterosexual and left the group. "The worst years of my
life," he says. "I was trying to be something God never wanted me to be --
and, God knows, I tried."

Jack McIntyre also tried, but with tragic consequences. Mr. McIntyre, gay
and Christian, feared an eternity in hell. He spent four years in Love in
Action fighting his passion for men and wound up in the psychiatric ward at
Marin General Hospital.

There, in 1977 at age 46, he recorded his thoughts in a letter: "No
matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually
failed. . . . I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the
choice is simple. . . . To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness
and make promises you know you can't keep is more than I can take. I feel it
is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life."

In room 104, he gave himself Communion, swallowed a lethal nightcap of
Valium and Dalmane -- tranquilizers and sleeping pills -- and lay down on a
couch to a quiet death.

Some gay men and lesbians who claim to have changed say they constantly
battle the demons of desire. "I don't know if I'll ever have the intensity for
sex with women that the average man on the street has," says John Paulk, a
seven-year member of Love in Action.

Mr. Paulk had been a prostitute, a female impersonator named Candi and an
alcoholic who tried to kill himself before he decided to become straight and
marry an ex-lesbian he met in church last year. "I had no sexual interest in
women at all," he says. "But when you begin a relationship with a woman that
you believe God has led you to, then you develop attraction to that person. To
say that we've arrived at this place of total heterosexuality -- that we're
totally healed -- is misleading."

Some call it a lie. Jack Pantaleo is a founder of the San Francisco
chapter of Evangelicals Concerned, a nondenominational group that condones
monogamous same-sex relationships. "The problem isn't homosexuality," says Mr.
Pantaleo, a fundamentalist Christian. "It's gluttony, it's sexual addiction."

Mr. Pantaleo had belonged to Exodus for four months at one point. During
meetings everyone said things were getting better, he says, but afterward men
would confess to him that their struggles were as bad as ever.

Still, many try, fail and keep trying.

In the early 1970s, Colin Cook, a Seventh-Day Adventist minister,
resigned from the church when he could no longer harmonize his gay liaisons
with his religious beliefs. Mr. Cook says he had sex with more than 1,000 men
in a frenzied decade before he decided that his behavior was wrong and started
Homosexuals Anonymous, a Christian support group for ex-gays with more than 40
chapters in the U.S. and abroad.

Then one day he felt aroused by a woman as they walked through a field
together on a warm day. "I could have jumped over the moon," he remembers. "I
felt like an adolescent." Four years later, at 38, he married a woman who knew
about his gay past. But over the next several years, Mr. Cook was giving nude
massages to men he was supposed to be leading away from the desert of
homosexuality at his spiritual redoubt, Quest Learning Center in Reading, Pa.
He says the massages involved about 30 out of 250 men, whom he was trying to
"desensitize" to the pleasures of male flesh. "It became erotic to me and I
was not admitting it," he says.

When some of the men talked publicly about their sexual experiences with
him, Mr. Cook resigned from the center, which closed after the Seventh-Day
Adventist Church withdrew its subsidy. Mrs. Cook beat his chest with her hands
when she found out. "You've taken 12 years of my life," she cried.

Six months later, he was again ministering to gays -- under strict church
supervision. Three years of therapy since then have also helped him become
"98%" free of male fantasies, Mr. Cook says. And this year, Mr. and Mrs. Cook,
who have two sons, celebrated their 14th anniversary.

For years, the ex-gay movement has been bedeviled by stories of stealth
couplings between members, often after meetings and at conventions. Jim Brooks
-- who says he had only one gay relationship 21 years ago -- says the feelings
that he thought he had dammed up over the years came flooding back when he
began counseling other would-be ex-gays in San Francisco five years ago.
"Satan would really want to get me to fall sexually with another man to
destroy the work of our ministry," he says.

Beat-the-devil night is Friday at the Foursquare Pentecostal Church in
Hayward, where 14 men and women -- young and old, veterans of tempestuous
homosexual lifestyles and those who never acted but have long anguished over
their fantasies -- gather to pray away their sexual desires. They sing songs,
read Bible verses and break into discussion groups. The men talk about why
they became gay, about childhood torments, about distant fathers.

An older man tells of the journal he kept of his sub rosa homosexual
life. His wife found the diary and read it to friends, relatives and their
children, who stopped speaking to him. "I raised them to believe being gay was
wrong," he says, his shoulders rising and falling with a deep breath. "Now
they don't understand."

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